Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Chris Pirillo
Chris Pirillo has been participating in Internet conversations since 1992, having launched Lockergnome.com as a content publishing network and building Gnomedex to be one of the blogosphere’s highly regarded conferences. He publishes a personal blog and lifecast to tens of thousands of viewers, and is a top subscribed partner on YouTube. When searching Google for “Chris,” his site is listed as the first result. He’s a monthly columnist for CPU Magazine, and has authored books on business and personal technology. Chris also produces weekly video segments for CNN.com Live, where he offers tech advice to a savvy audience.
Liz Strauss
Liz Strauss is a social web strategist who focuses on growth through relationships, communication and performance. She has worked in the US, Europe, Australia, the UK, and Ireland, with businesses, universities, and individuals on their products, marketing, and social web strategies to help them seamlessly integrate online and offline into one vision. Her own Successful-Blog.com features nearly 4000 posts, over 84,000 comments, and a fiercely loyal community. Liz has spoken at the Cass Business School of City University in London and been a visiting profession at the City University School of Publishing. She is a founder of the highly successful business bloggers conference SOBCon, Biz School for Bloggers — that gained the attention of BusinessWeek, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Innovation Initiative of the Kellogg School of Business. She has been named to the Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers Top 100 Most Influential Marketers of 2008, the 50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women of Social Media, NxE’s Fifty Most Influential ‘Female’ Bloggers. Her blog is listed on http://alltop.com/socialmedia and http://alltop.com/twitterati
Large Group Presentations
Ian Lurie – Internet Therapy: Tough Love for your Blog
Ian Lurie is Chief Marketing Curmudgeon and President at Portent Interactive, a firm he started in 1995. Portent is a full-service internet marketing company whose services include SEO, SEM and strategic consulting.
Ian built his firm, his blog and his career around the idea that the internet is a fantastic marketing medium, but that it hasn’t fundamentally changed the rules of successful marketing: A great product, a great message, well-crafted content and careful analysis will always win out.
Ian recently co-published the Web Marketing for Dummies All In One Desk Reference. In it, he wrote the sections on SEO, blogging, social media and web analytics. He’s the author of Conversation Marketing, the blog (at www.conversationmarketing.com) and the book by the same name.
Jane Wells -
Jane Wells, a former Seattle native, has been working in user experience for a decade, and with Automattic for the past year. Jane works with the WordPress core development team to determine features and design of the core application (such as the admin UI redesign of 2.7), and works to create non-traditional contribution opportunities within the open source project. Her pet concern right now is how to increase the participation of women in WordPress development. A frequent WordCamp speaker and attendee, Jane looks forward to meeting members of the local community to hear their feedback on the WordPress application and to drum up some new volunteers. Don’t be shy, introduce yourself!
Breakout Sessions
Maya Bisineer WordPress ease, power and flexibility to run a mommy blog AND an entrepreneur blog
Maya starting blogging on WordPress back in 2005. Since end of 2008, Maya forked her personal blog into 2 separate blogs – an entrepreneurship blog and a life blog. The power of WordPress, WordPress themes and plugins let Maya maintain two separate blogs – while designing and deploying a consistent theme across them all by herself.
Maya is the founder of Memetales – an online children’s book publishing and marketplace. Memetales also helps writers and illustrators collaborate through an online collaboration space. Before she started Memetales, Maya worked as a software developer, architect and consultant in bigger corporations for a number of years. She regularly speaks (Ignite Seattle, 140conf), moderates and leads panels and training sessions related to technology and Social Media. Maya is Director of Education at Social Media Club, Seattle; sits on the advisory board for the Digital Arts Program at The Everett Community College and was heavily involved in the production of the tech conference Gnomedex 9.0. The best way to reach her is on twitter (@thinkmaya).
Aaron Hockley – After Launching a Couple Dozen Blogs, I Figured Out How to do it Right
Aaron Hockley is a photographer and blogger with several years experience using WordPress and other social media technologies. He is the founder of WordCamp Portland and can often be found at tech events in the Portland area. In addition to blogging for his various personal and professional projects, he contributes to OurPDX and is a past author for Metroblogging Portland. Aaron lives with his wife and two young children in Vancouver, Washington.
Mark McLaren - Business Blogging 101 with WordPress
Mark McLaren is a recovering webmaster turned WordPress fanatic. In 2005, he founded McBuzz Communications, an online marketing consultancy specializing in social media, search engine optimization and business websites & blogs. Business Blogging 101 is his site dedicated to free WordPress tutorials. You can connect with him on http://mcbuzz.com and http://twitter.com/mcbuzz
Brett Nordquist – How Dad Blogging Makes Me a Better Father
Brett Nordquist started blogging about technology in 1999 but later refocused his writing around fatherhood and the observations and adventures that come with helping raise four children. Brett is the Technical Operations Manager for CompuCom. His group of technicians manages all technical aspects for nearly 500 annual events for Microsoft that include trade shows, conferences and product launches. Brett also worked as a Product Manager for the Microsoft Project and Microsoft Office teams. Brett holds a B.A. degree in German from the University of Utah.
Scott Porad - Wordpress at the Cheezburger Factory
Scott Porad is the Cheezburger Technology Officer of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind the hugely popular I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org. The Cheezburger Network is a collection of web sites where millions of people share moments of joy through the humor and wonder of LOL. Before focusing on user-generated content, Scott focused on e-commerce and online retail as part of the initial launch team at drugstore.com, and online publishing and content management at ESPN.com. And, prior to that, Scott worked in New York for Seth Godin’s Yoyodyne Entertainment and Small World Software. Scott live in Seattle, Washington with my wife and two children, and occasionally writes essays about music.
Lorelle Van Fossen – Content Creation with WordPress
Lorelle VanFossen has been around the WordPress and WordCamp map. She’s presented keynotes and programs at WordCamps in Israel, San Francisco, Hawaii, Dallas, Toronto, Whistler, Portland, and will be speaking in Holland, Israel, and other places in the world in the next few months. She is the host of the Lorelle on WordPress, providing WordPress and blogging tips for bloggers of all levels, and a long time contributor to the Blog Herald. A web publishing consultant, she also serves as the editor-in-chief of Woopra, the hot new web analtyics program that is changing the web, and works with Bitwire Media and hosts the Liz and Lorelle Show podcast with Liz Strauss and featured contributor on WordCast, the WordPress podcast with Dave Moyer and Kym Huynh. She is the author of the fast-selling book, “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”.
Patrick Shih and Will Duff – Easy Blogging with LiveWriter
Patrick and Will are members of the Windows Live Writer team, a productivity tool for bloggers. Patrick is a Program Manager that focuses on all areas of the product. Will is the newest develop on the team. Patrick holds a degree from Stanford University and Will recently graduated from the University of Illinois. Both Patrick and Will currently reside in Seattle, Washington.
Will Norris is a software engineer specializing in identity related protocols such as OpenID, OAuth, and SAML. As a developer on the DiSo Project, he maintains a number of WordPress plugins which implement many of these technologies and seek to enable social interaction between distributed blogs. He lives with his wife in Portland, and can be found online at http://willnorris.com.
and YOU!
That’s right, we are talking to you! WordCamp is a conference for WordPress users by WordPress users. Besides the standard workshop format, we have two additional formats to learn amd share about WordPress.
Ignite
We will have an Ignite-style session, where participants will have 5 minutes to share a slide presentation about what they are doing with WordPress. Watch our blog for more details.
Unconference tracks
During our breakout sessions, we will be running at least two unconference tracks. What does that mean? During registration Saturday morning, we will have an open grid for the unconference tracks. Do you have something exciting to share? Sign up to present in one of the open grids. We will be posting more details in the coming days.
